Ice Camp

This was a view our ice camp from the helicopter. You can see Mount Erebus in the background, and it was steaming away, as it is still an active volcano. We were really away from everything except nature, and could hear the silence of the night, broken by the pinging of the ice on occasion when new cracks formed. I always wondered what happens to the tide when the ocean is frozen over. We certainly were not going up and down with the tide, though, because off to the right was land, to which this "fast ice" was attached. It did move though, we could tell, as cracks would form. Sometimes "pressure ridges" would form where ice broke and the two sides pushed together, raising up a whole line of broken ice, sometimes several feet high. For the most part it was flat. There is something wonderful about having such an expansive view of the landscape. What a sense of space out there!

White-out

It was during a white-out storm that I did these sketches of Sara Wheeler writing her book, "Terra Incognita" inside our ice camp hut. (You can see the white through the windows). She wrote about our experiences at Wooville, and as I reread them now, I relive the experience again. However, as "creative" non-fiction, it has its embellishments, but it does give an amusing, and well written picture. We were lucky that our project dates overlapped at McMurdo, as it takes a minimum of two people to set up a field camp. We got along very well, working all day, exploring out on the ice during good weather days. After work, we made a big deal of dinner, cooking up something from the mostly freeze dried supplies, a few fresh things that keep well, like garlic and onions. We collected ice to melt for water. It was a simple life, writing, painting, and living out in the wilderness, and brings back fond memories.

Wooville

I came across this watercolor that I did of our field camp on the frozen Ross Sea. This is the camp where a British writer and I were staying when the group of Emperor penguins came in for a visit one night. It consisted of two wooden huts on 6 feet of frozen sea. What an amazing experience that was! I was part of the National Science Foundation Artist and Writer's program doing paintings and drawings during the beautiful Antarctic spring season. Then, the 24 hour sunlight of summer had not yet started, and we had many hours of long twilight. The red vehicle on the left was our "Spryte" which is like a small bulldozer with tracks for going over the hummocky ice. It would crawl along at 10 mph and could get us to McMurdo Station in two hours if the weather was good. The middle hut we used for cooking on our Coleman stove, and the hut on the right we used for living and working, as it had two wooden bunks and two tables. Both were heated with an oil drip stove, so we were quite toasty, even when outside temperatures hovered around minus 50 degrees Farenheit (-45 C). The line of green flags marked the bamboo sticks that held up our radio antenna. Each morning at 9 AM we would call in to McMurdo Station to say that all was well at our field camp. All field camps had a specific call-in time, which was just a safety check. We could then turn off the radio and experience peace of the Antarctic wilderness. On a day like this one, we could bundle up and go out for a walk (with icepicks to check the sea ice), or go for a ride in the Spryte. On stormy days, we worked inside, as whiteout conditions would reduce visibility to zero. In some cases you could hardly see your boots through the blowing snow, and had to stand at a 45 angle to the wind just to stand up! There was no wandering on those days. We could just get to the other hut by following a 20 foot rope, so as not to get lost on the way over!